


The Ghosts of Should-Have-Been

by Kibbers



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Conversations with Ghosts, Ghosts, Hospitals, Injury, Loneliness, M/M, Ocean Metaphors, Touch-Starved, hand holding, happyish, original case, pretty anti-team, tw for mentions of vomiting, until the end, up through season 6, very angsty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-10-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:29:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 16,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24834631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kibbers/pseuds/Kibbers
Summary: Hotch said, “You’re keeping score, just like Owen.”If Spencer had been keeping score, the world was winning. The rolled eyes, the disinterested gazes, the way they spoke to him only when they wanted something. Only when they wanted notebooks read at an inhuman rate or statistics they could use for the profile, for a bet, for the delight of having them at all. If Reid was keeping score, he had the right to do so if only to prove to himself that he deserved to feel a little hurt. He deserved to step in front of a bullet to save a kid that felt the same way he did.
Relationships: Aaron Hotchner/Spencer Reid
Comments: 69
Kudos: 348





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A lot has been done wrong when it comes to the writing of Reid's storylines. This is an attempt to acknowledge that and to right it in my own way. This is pretty anti-team. If that bothers you, I'd recommend moving along.

Spencer Reid was seeing ghosts. He had been for some time. The ghosts, they looked like people he loved, people he was not certain loved him back. He could not say when the apparitions began. It was hard to tell when they were real. The ghosts, they breathed like real people did. The ghosts, they tasted sweet.

He developed a hypothesis and discovered rules. 

  1. The ghosts were always kind. 
  2. They listened when he spoke, no matter his rambling. 
  3. They smiled. 
  4. The ghosts knew when he was hurt. 
  5. The ghosts knew exactly what to say. 
  6. They tried to touch him with gentle fingers.
  7. When they tried, they disappeared. 



The people they imitated, the real counterparts to these ghosts, Morgan and Prentiss and the rest of the team, did none of those things. That was how he knew when to close his eyes and count to ten. That was why Reid stopped touching people. He was afraid to discover his favorite moments were invention. That their kindness was a false reality he longed to be real so badly he could taste oranges in the air. The scent of wanting what he could never have, citrus fruits in the wintertime.

* * *

Hotch kicked him and kept kicking. He said cruel things with a furrow in his brow. It was real. It was real. He hurt so badly with how real it was. This Hotch was no ghost. The ache in his ribs was proof of that fact. Still, Spencer understood. How could he not? Hotch moved the hostages out of his line of fire. Reid knew what he was thinking. Minimize the damage, even as he cracked ribs in Reid’s chest. Even as he turned him blue. What were bruises on Reid who had grown up covered in them? What could be lost there, when people’s lives were on the line? People other than Reid.

Hotch said things aloud he’d usually keep behind pressed lips. Called Reid _smart guy_. Called Reid _a dalmatian_. Less then, even. Said, “I think he got the message.”

Did he think these things of Reid? Had he always been thinking these things when he looked at Reid across a conference table, out his office window, when he thought of him at all. Did he think of Reid when Reid wasn’t around? Walking around his kitchen in sweatpants, after he said goodnight to his wife? Something about that sentiment made Reid’s chest hurt. It was only the bruising. It was only the pain.

Reid got the gun.

Reid took the shot.

Reid joked Hotch out of his guilt.

It was no different to Reid, Hotch’s apology. The case was worked. The day was done. It was wheels up in thirty, kiss your trauma goodbye at the door. What happened happened. Reid was a different person, then. Now it was time to go back to normal. They expected him to be himself no matter his wounds. The apology bookmarked that moment. There was no going back. There was never any going back.

But there were no jokes told to the jester. His guilt? It stayed right where it was. Waves in the pit of his stomach. Waves that threatened to drown him. 

Reid took the shot. 

Reid took a life. 

Reid took his guilt home with him. 

Spread it out on the coffee table and dissected it. Peered at it from all angles except from outside of himself. It was an impossibility to do it without his own eyes. Without his own brain. What would Hotch think about his guilt? What would anyone? There were some things analysis didn’t help. There were some hurts science couldn’t heal. This, he supposed, was one of those. He went to bed with shaking hands. No one noticed come morning.

Reid was used to being the king’s jester. When he performed mathematical feats, Emily poked his cheek and commented on how lifelike he was. Implying his inhumanness. Speaking aloud his isolation. The poke was real. She was not smiling. This was his reality. The team oddity. The team’s circus animal. A mermaid washed ashore and gawked at while he drowned. He’d perform miracles. He’d elicit laughter. They’d scoff and roll their eyes. They’d walk away while he spoke. Such was the way of the jester in the kingdom. At least he was allowed inside their walls. At least he was not left out in the rain.

* * *

Ghosts appeared while he was tied down, bruises forming in the bottom of his foot while his team watched from the other end of a lens. 

Prentiss crouched in front of him and grinned. 

Morgan ruffled his hair. 

J.J. tilted her head ever so slightly to the side and told him to be strong. 

Each time, the ghosts reached out their hands. Each time they dissolved into nothing just before they met his skin. Each time, Spencer’s resolve snapped. He had believed. _He had believed_. He had believed they had come to save him. They had not.

Hour by hour, the ghosts flickered. Spencer lost consciousness. Lost his breath. When the darkness came, and came it did, he saw them all, standing above him, bidding him goodbye. It was a shock. He thought he could make them understand. He thought he could make _Hotch_ understand. Hotch who listened with his furrowed brow. Hotch who said very little, but never anything cruel. The LDSK case was behind them, even if Hotch’s words still rattled through Reid’s head. It was supposed to be behind them. If Hotch could not understand, as he had asked Reid to, once, without saying a goddamn word, then there was no use in hoping at all.

The darkness, as it always did, arrived with gloved hands and quietly, quietly, turned out the lights. When he came gaspingly back to life, Spencer was alone. 

He grabbed the shovel.

He moved the dirt.

He dug his grave.

This was it. Death was a fair ruler. He could not cheat it twice. He had given it a good old college try. Still, somehow, again, he managed to remain upright and breathing. He was no certain he was alive despite these two facts. He did not feel so alive at that moment. He could not remember the last time he had.

At the end of the day, despite his appeals to his team, to _Hotch_ , Spencer Reid had to save himself. That was knowledge he tucked away while Hotch yanked him into an embrace. While he hugged them, each by each, the voice coming from the depths of the sea in his gut chanting, _the real ones failed you._ He could not argue against that fact. He had to admit, he liked the ghosts far more.

* * *

After the rescuing of himself, Reid was struggling, and no one would say a thing about it. They knew. Of course, they knew. They could profile a man down to his socks. They could profile each other out of their secrets. How could they not know, then, his addiction? 

Prentiss asked, “What is the matter with you?” 

Morgan told him it was called empathy, almost dying. That he should use it to make him a better profiler. Reid opened up to him and _that_ was all he got in return? He knew better than to expect more, but still, it stung. Ants on a picnic blanket finding bared skin.

On another flight, in another world, the ghost version of Morgan listened as he spoke. Told him it sucked what he went through. Told Reid he was sorry. The ghost version of Morgan said all the right things and reached out to touch Reid’s hand. Of course. Of course. It was a trick of the light. Morgan would never be that kind to him. Not out loud. Not like that.

He was kind to Reid in ways that told Reid Morgan would never understand him. Would look at him as if through the window of an exhibit at the museum. Only curious until he got bored and drifted elsewhere. Only listened if there was a point, if he had a goal, if he needed to feel like a good person for asking Reid if he was okay. 

Hotch and Gideon eyed him from beneath their narrowed brows. At least they didn’t pretend. At least they were honest about not knowing how to help, not caring enough to try.

Later, when Spencer missed the flight and the team grew more and more frustrated, the ghost versions of them were sympathetic. They acknowledged his problems, the fact that he had problems at all. They demanded nothing of him. They let him be. 

Of all of the universes to be dropped into, this was the version in which he was the loneliest.

When Spencer tried to talk to Gideon while Ethan played piano across the room. He said, “I’m struggling.”

Gideon said, “I know.”

He could not tell if it, Gideon, was real that time. Spencer kept his hands to himself. It was better, here, not to know. To think this was real. That someone, once, sought him out. Knew he was struggling. Wanted to help. Spencer was a coward. He wanted to think this was real more than anything. He stopped touching people if he could avoid it. Some things were better trusted than tested, even to Reid. Even to Reid.

* * *

Gideon left.

Morgan turned his back in the middle of a conversation.

J.J. cut him off while he talked of Pinocchio.

Thus were the relationships of a jester. As a child, Spencer Reid loved pressing on his bruises. Bruises of which he had many. He knew he was real when he hurt. He liked the hiss of them. The sigh of feeling, feeling anything, at the height of the pain. Elation, euphoria, when the pain ebbed. It would all go away, one day, the way he’d press where there ought to be pain and found, at some indistinguishable moment, the bruise had healed.

It was in that same vein, the way Reid continued to believe questions asked after his interests, of what he did over the weekend. The pressing and then, when Morgan walked away, Prentiss rolled her eyes, Rossi told him to shut up, the height of the pain. It hurt. It would fade. Thus were the bruises, thus were the wounds.

* * *

In that little room, the metal table, the open window, Spencer knew how to talk them out of getting killed. Knew, too, that Hotch did not. The king fought with fists. The jester distracted the eye. When Hotch was shrugging off his jacket, loosening his tie, Spencer could see the future. They would not make it out alive. 

So, he did what he did best. He opened his mouth and began to speak. Physics magic. Sleight of hand. His own simple existence. He could pull attention and hold it, his audience incredulous. His audience wondering what on earth this _thing_ was in front of them. He hoped he could hold it long enough for the guards to come, runninly, back. 

While the rest of the team would’ve told him to shut up, would have walked away, Hotch eyed him while rounding Hardwick. 

He knew Spencer’s strengths. He knew Spencer's weaknesses, too. 

When it was over, in the car, Hotch thanked him for what he had done. A jester was a jester, even under intense fear. Still, Hotch admitted, he had not helped things. No, Spencer could agree with that. He hadn’t helped. But he knew nothing but his own skills the same way Reid only knew his own. Had it been a fistfight to the death, Reid would have been the one with thanks to give.

“Haley wants me to sign the divorce papers uncontested, so nobody wastes money on lawyers,” Hotch said, suddenly, shockingly, rushingly. 

Spencer frowned. A peace offering? An acknowledgment of Spencer’s sacrifice? He couldn’t tell. “You don’t want to?”

“What I want, I’m not going to get.”

Vulnerability. Reid looked at the edges of Hotch's profile, searching for the tell-tale blur. Hotch was stiff, the frowning of his brow in place as it always was. Reid, before he could stop himself, reached out and touched Hotch’s shoulder. Not a pat, not a grasp, but somewhere in the vicinity of those two actions. 

Hotch was solid.

Hotch was warm.

Hotch was _real_.

He turned to Spencer, not frowning, but not smiling either. An eyebrow quirked in question. Beneath Spencer’s fingers, Hotch’s shoulder relaxed ever so slightly. It _relaxed_. A warmth appeared in Spencer’s sternum. Something born like a young sun. He’d have to drown it, before it could thrive. Jesters did not get to touch kings like that.

“Making sure you’re real,” Spencer whispered. 

“What?” Hotch asked.

“I’m sorry, about Haley.”

“Me too,” Hotch said. 

For the rest of the car ride, Reid held his hand, palm-up, in his lap. The feel of Hotch’s shoulder, the gentling of it beneath his own fingers. He wanted to flex it, test that he, too, was real. He resisted that action. This one, he wanted to be real so badly he’d allow delusions to make it so.

* * *

Spencer recognized all of the signs of himself in Owen which was why he could not let Hotch shoot him. Why he could not let anyone. They would, he knew. Oh, he knew. They would the same way, had Reid’s own life gone just ever so slightly differently, they’d shoot him, too, without hesitation. 

Spencer used his body as a shield and talked to Owen in a gentle voice. He smiled at the boy. He showed him what the ghosts could look like, had they been real. Had he been different. Had the world been changed. Spencer was kind to him, made him promises he would keep no matter what. If Spencer could not have such simple kindnesses, he’d put his life on the line to make sure Owen got one, at least. Just one was enough. Reid thought of the moment in the car. Yes, one was enough to keep going.

On the plane, Reid sat alone, his back turned. He felt errant eyes. He felt whispered thoughts. It was worse to be misunderstood by many, than to be alone and himself.

Hotch slid into the seat across from him. Folded his hands on the cold table, sleeves rising with his movements. He was the judge in this kingdom, too. He had shrugged his billowing robes on. 

Hotch said, “I should fire you.”

Hotch said, “You are not the only one in that room.”

Hotch said, “You’re keeping score, just like Owen.”

If Spencer had been keeping score, the world was winning. The rolled eyes, the disinterested gazes, the way they spoke to him only when they wanted something. Only when they wanted notebooks read at an inhuman rate or statistics they could use for the profile, for a bet, for the delight of having them at all. If Reid was keeping score, he had the right to do so if only to prove to himself that he deserved to feel a little hurt. He deserved to step in front of a bullet to save a kid that felt the same way he did.

“I know it’s painful when the person you identify with is the bad guy.”

“What’s that make me?” What did that make Reid? Truth was, he had seen himself in other unsubs before. More than a handful if he was being honest. If he was the only one in the room identifying with the bad guys, maybe he was in the wrong room.

“Good at the job,” Hotch said. Reid wanted to ask if Hotch ever identified with the bad guys. If he ever thought, in another timeline, that he could see himself pulling the trigger, sinking the knife, clenching his hands. But the judge had cast his verdict and he was exiting to his chambers. There was no room for asking questions once his back was turned.

As he stood, leaving Reid alone, again, Hotch grabbed his shoulder. Squeezed, _hard_. It was real. It was real. Hotch came to talk to him. Hotch didn’t fire him. He was as kind as he ever was, voice soft and asking questions, not only to discipline him, but also to understand. The young sun in his chest was not gone. It was aging, as all young things did. Soon, it would be stronger. Soon, Spencer would have to deal with it. Soon, but not yet.

For now, he’d sit on the plane with it inside of him. He’d warm his fingertips against the fact that Hotch cared enough to be angry, cared enough not to fire him, cared enough to touch his shoulder so he’d never have to wonder if the moment was real after all.

* * *

Reid was held hostage. 

Reid was dreaming nightmares. 

Reid was pressing on bruises. 

Pressing on bruises, pressing, and pressing, and pretending all the while it was helping them heal. But, still, they remained because of course they did. Time and time again, he took blows from ghosts. Bruises underneath bruises until it hit bone. 

Reid _had_ to stop believing when they were kind.

* * *

Out the window stood Hotch and Morgan while Spencer began to die. He could see, through the windowpane, as Morgan paced. As he grew angry. He was a knight. He drove bombs into open fields. He kicked down doors and carried out the desperate and the damaged. Spencer wondered, briefly, if he were a ghost. His clenched fists, his voice taut. Was that for Reid, or for the simple fact that it was not Morgan inside, this time? That it was not Morgan, saving the day alone? Dying for this team, being the one cared for, not the one having to care? With the glint of the glass, Reid's rising panic, it was hard to be sure. 

Beside him, Hotch was calm. Hotch was cool. Hotch told him it was better for him to stay where he was. To find a solution. Hotch made no apologies nor rescue attempts. But there was a wavering in his voice. The slightest waver. Was he real? Was any of it?

Spencer thought back and could not remember a time when Hotch was a ghost to him. When the ghosts of what could, _should_ , have been included Hotch. He had no frame of reference for the ways his ghost told on itself beyond touching him. Glass separated them. Spencer stared at him as they spoke on either side. The twitch of Hotch’s fingers against the phone. The deep-set frown carved into his face. Real or not real? 

As he worked to cure himself, to rescue himself yet again, Reid thought it over. Turned it upside down. The involuntary give away of fingers unable to stay still in panic, even as his voice fought not to betray him. Was Hotch worried and worried about Reid? If he was, what did that mean? Kings worried not about their jesters. There were fools born every minute. Every goddamn minute. It would take nothing to replace him.

If Reid was not welcome in the kingdom, let him wail in the woods. Let him be the story parents told to children to scare them home before dark. Let him be a sign of their love, their willingness to give children nightmares they would carry with them their whole lives for the sole purpose of keeping them alive. Let them turn him into a monster. Let him keep people safe that way.

* * *

Spencer saw ghosts from his hospital bed. Prentiss and Garcia, Rossi and Morgan. They bent over top him, eyes searching, for what he did not know. He was asleep, again, before he could ask. Before he could determine whether they were his dreaded inventions of what he wanted them to be. Before they proved to be specters in the light.

When he woke, again, a cup of Jell-O sat on his little-wheeled table with a bite missing. He remembered Morgan, sitting in that very chair, scooping it out with a plastic spoon. Spencer grabbed the cup and held it to his chest. Proof, proof, what delightful proof that he was cared about, once, and had missed it.

Spencer refused to eat the Jello-O all day. While he slept, a nurse threw the half-eaten cup out. He wept the next morning. Wept and wept. Where had his proof gone? 

No one visited him the rest of his stay. They all had other things to worry about.

* * *

It was not an opportune time to be shot in the knee, Reid could admit to that. But when was there ever an opportune moment to be shot in the knee? To be shot at all? He was certain there were statistics on that. Reid couldn’t say. He was in too much pain. 

Despite the injury, despite being alone, he managed to keep the situation under control until backup arrived. When his teammates rushed to his side, he gestured them away. Don’t touch him. Don’t touch him. Let him believe the concern on their faces. Let him believe their instinct was to head toward him, to crouch, gently at his side, to worry and panic and call for medics with tight voices. Let him believe their gut reaction was kindness. He needed to believe that, just then. 

It hurt when they did not fight him. It hurt when they did not prove they were real. It hurt when Spencer laid, yet again, in a hospital bed and each time he opened his eyes, each chair in the room was empty. The nurse brought extra in for his team, one for every member. Instead, they were used by his ghosts, who paced while he slept, who worried at their lips, who called people who called people who wondered how he was doing. 

But, one by one, the ghosts disappeared, and Reid was alone.

In another hospital room, in another town, all the king's men gathered to worry about someone else. Reid understood. It was the king, after all, who lay wounded there. Spencer was no one. Still, while Spencer lay there alone, Rossi told Hotch about the case they worked without him. He said, “It was a happy ending.”

Spencer didn’t quite know what was happy about it. He wasn’t happy at all.

* * *

Garcia said, “You’re my bitch now.”

Prentiss said, “There’s a lot to hate about you, Dr. Reid.”

Morgan asked, “Is it really that hard for you to be normal just one time?”

Rossi said, “So, how long is it going to take you to get in that ditch?”

Spencer said, “I have an extra ticket.” No one responded.

Pressing on bruises. Pressing on bruises. Maybe he ought not to be pressing on his bruises.

Spencer did not understand why he was not welcome in the kingdom, despite the tithing he had paid. What did the king require that Spencer had not already sacrificed? 

He gave them his brain. 

He gave them his body. 

He gave them his blood.

Spencer, it seemed, was not the jester nor the wailing. He was the boy bagged, the boy sunk in a lake, for simply being too much for the village to bear. 

* * *

A new case arrived with the June. In it, each victim radiated isolation in a way Reid felt in his own chest. It was only obvious, then, for him to lay down on the tracks. 

The victims were found in their cars, all in the same parking lot, parked with an empty space on each side. A row of cars, a row of coffins. Six of them. They had been trapped there, in their vehicles, despite undamaged doors. Despite their keys still sitting inside. The victims, in their desperation, began to eat their hands. They all had their debts to be paid. Student loans and hospital bills and coping mechanisms that came gift-wrapped. If ghosts tasted of citrus, desperation was its rotten counterpart.

Reid told no one. He snuck off alone. He didn’t have to pretend at all that he was desperate enough to see the flyer and to join the competition to survive, alone, in his car the longest and win a cash prize. A large cash prize. His mother’s expenses were weighty and, really, he could use some good luck.

When he arrived in the parking lot in the middle of nowhere, six other cars were scattered throughout. He remembered his instructions from the man on the phone. _Park with empty spaces on either side. Lock your doors. You may bring water, but nothing else. I’ll be watching._

Reid left his phone at home. 

Reid brought only water. 

Reid pulled into a space with emptiness on either side.

Reid did not know that he wanted to be rescued this time. He was fine being found too late.

He looked around at the other people. A woman in her late thirties, a mother by the looks of her back seat. A man in his sixties with cancer, probably. The ones parked beyond he could not see. But he knew them. He _knew_ them. They, too, were the people sunk. The people tied up in canvas sacks and sent sailing down into the water. The people who tossed them over the edge did not even stay to watch as they fought, and fought, and drowned.

Didn’t they deserve an audience, at least? Didn’t they deserve a witness?

If the king required more from Reid, let them chop off his hands. Let him go dancing to death, bleeding from his wound, knowing the king would see them, his long fingers, and smile. 

Hotch would figure it out, eventually. Hotch would understand, eventually. The way he shrugged off his jacket with Hardwick? He had flashes of Reid’s own pain inside of him. 

He wanted to be wanted. 

He wasn’t going to get what he wanted.

After twenty-four hours, the first ghost arrived. Reid was surprised to find the sound of the door opening, the shift of new weight inside the car. He turned to find Hotch, sitting beside him. He was surprised. He made no attempts to mask that. Not here, not now, as he starved to death on his own stubbornness.

“What are you doing?” Hotch asked. He had shed his suit jacket and his tie, much like the prison. His sleeves were rolled to his elbows. Bared skin. Temptation. Reid’s fingers twitched. The sun in his chest wanted warmth. Wanted fodder. Hotch wasn’t the only one that wasn’t going to get what he wanted.

“I’m desperate, didn’t you know?” Reid laughed.

“Where are we going?” Hotch asked. He gestured to the keys in the cupholder. He came dangerously close to brushing Reid’s skin. He fought the tug in his chest and recoiled. 

“Where would you like to go?” Reid asked.

“What I want, I’m not going to get.”

“What do you want, Hotch?”

“To feel better.” His voice was even, but there was that wavering. Reid heard that before, out the windowpane. What did it mean? What did Reid want it to mean?

“Me too.”

“I’m sorry,” Hotch said.

“Me too,” Reid said.

“Talk to me,” Hotch said, “Tell me about the stars.”

So, Reid told him about the stars. He talked until his voice went hoarse and then he kept talking some more. Not once did Hotch tell him to shut up. Not once did he zone out. He asked follow-up questions. He wanted Reid to keep talking. 

Tell him more.

Tell him more.

Tell him more. 

The young sun in Reid’s chest was now burning. It hurt, to feel. It hurt. Pressing on bruises. Holding down on them until tears formed. What was one more? 

“You’re the only one who is kind to me,” Reid said. “I could love you so easily.”

He turned and Hotch lifted his hand, all that exposed skin, bringing it toward Reid’s on the console. 

“Don’t,” Spencer said, Hotch freezing in mid-air, a jerked hover in the space between them. “Please.”

But, Hotch brought his hand down and when Reid blinked, Hotch was gone. The smell of citrus, even here.

Okay, that one hurt.

On the third day, Spencer understood hunger. He thought he had before, the way he watched people be kind to each other. The way he watched Garcia bake cookies for Hotch despite his knee, watched when everyone stopped what they were doing to ask Morgan if he was okay after he was attacked in the Spicer case, watched when they crowded Garcia’s hospital bed. The way every single person on the team attended Garcia’s play. 

He had had an extra ticket, before. He had asked and gotten only silence. Yet, there they all were, watching the play Garcia had not even asked them to attend. Had pointedly not told them to attend. Yes, he thought he understood hunger before.

But, as Hotch continued to appear in the passenger seat, to ask him questions and look at him softly, to try to understand him and his actions, the desperation only grew with the growling in his gut. 

He would not eat his hands. Those were meant for the king. A parting gift. 

Spencer was out of water, he was out of time, he was off, in another universe, where everything worked out and he hadn’t felt the need to do this at all. In that universe, Hotch kissed his cheek. In that universe, everyone got what they wanted.

As he closed his eyes, as the heaviness pressed against him, he found he liked it. Pressing on the bruise of his entire existence, pressing through his chest to squeeze his heart. The height of the pain. Voices, calling his name.

 _Hotch’s_ voice, calling his name. 

The window shattered at his side, glass rainfall. It registered in another universe, the cutting of his skin. The door opened and hands from that other universe grasped his cheeks, said his name. The hands were frantic. The hands were on the run. The hands pulled him, roughly, from the car. The asphalt was recently warm, but that was fading. Reid liked in-between states. The sun was setting in the sky above. A bruise. How kind.

Hotch’s hands skittered Reid’s body, seeking blood. Wanting to find blood, somewhere to place the blame. A mix of relief at not finding any and the panic of not having anything to do with his hands to help. He let out a breath. A crack split through his voice as he called for medical. Reid was surprised by this. 

There it was. The release. The sigh. Spencer was euphoric even as he fought to stay awake. He couldn't lift his arms, but he managed to twitch his fingers. Hotch understood. Hotch was a man who had long ago learned to repress everything. He had lived his whole life through involuntary twitches. 

Hotch held Spencer’s hand, tight in his own. He was furious the way a man who did not want to be furious but couldn’t help it was. The way a man who did not know how else to show love except through clenched fists was.

“Thank God,” Hotch muttered and, at the same time, “How could you be so stupid?”

An ambulance arrived and Hotch let go of Reid’s hand. 

“I’m riding with him,” he said to the paramedic. His voice was stern and cold, and the paramedic could not argue with a glacier like that. Did not even try.

Where were the king’s men, Spencer wondered? Where were the realities of all of his could-have-beens? 

“You gave up,” Hotch said as the paramedics grew arms and worked over Reid’s body. “You gave up.”

“I am not welcome in the kingdom,” Reid rasped, voice raw from talking to the air for hours. Talking to the Hotch that lived inside his head. “I think I invented you.”

Hotch had stopped touching him. He sat, hands rubbing at his temples. Reid knew what he was thinking. He’d have been thinking the same thing, had Hotch come tumbling from that darkness.

“I wasn’t alone,” Reid said. “The ghosts kept me company.”

“The ghosts?” Hotch blinked up at Reid, eyes focused with exquisite intensity. He was thinking of nothing but Reid, just then. The sun set. The sun rose. Reid’s chest was a world turning too quickly, threatening to hurtle off course.

“The ghosts of you.”

“What do the ghosts say?” Hotch asked.

Spencer smiled. “They are kind to me like no one else is.”

Hotch’s face betrayed a flinch, but his body remained stiff. What side would win in this war, the war of a king against himself? Reid was once a betting man. He put money on the body before the flinch, though the sun in his chest whispered something else. Something worse. Something far more hopeful. Something far more painful.

“When I was shot,” Spencer continued, “they filled all of the empty chairs.”

Hotch blinked at Reid, paramedics placing an oxygen mask over his face and stopping whatever it was he was going to say, mouth left half-open by the interruption. Spencer let his eyes close. He couldn’t fight enough to open his eyes, to see, for certain, if Hotch was real or if he’d been another figment of a lonely imagination at his most desperate for hands to pull him from his depths. For hands to try and stop the bleeding. 

“I’m sorry,” Hotch said, half-real and half-ghost. Finally, _finally_ , someone apologized for leaving him alone.

* * *

Waking in a hospital room was more familiar than Spencer wanted it to be. Familiar, too, were the figures pacing his bed. Morgan with his fists clenched. Prentiss worrying at her chin. Rossi leaning against the doorframe. J.J. hunched and close to weeping. These were all familiar sights. 

Spencer blinked and blinked again. Still, they remained. He was wrong. This was wholly new. 

“You’re real,” Reid said, voice coming out near a whisper. All heads in the room whipped around despite his softness. 

Morgan turned, grin splitting through the concrete of his worry. “Yeah, kid, we’re real.”

One by one, they approached Reid and touched him, a graze of his foot beneath the hospital blanket, a pat on the arm, a ruffle of the hair. 

“Don’t ever do that again,” Garcia said, kissing his cheek. “Scared all the color out of me.”

“We can’t have that,” Reid said, smiling.

“No, we definitely can’t,” Morgan agreed.

As they stood around, eyes full of worry at the fact that Reid had done what he had done, gotten himself into that situation, hadn’t opened his goddamn door, all their sharp edges stayed sharp. Reid wanted to cut himself. He wanted scars as proof.

Morgan went to find a coffee to sneak into the room while J.J. slipped out to call Will. Rossi tagged along with Garcia to rummage up some snacks. Prentiss joined them, linking arms with them both as they walked down the hallway. It was orchestrated. It was intentional. Hotch appeared in the doorway as if by magic.

His anger flooded the room, jumping from his stiff shoulders, willing to drown, seeking relief anywhere else. Not a ghost, then, Reid figured. But he’d said the same thing on the ambulance and in the end, he wasn’t so sure. He had only touched him on the asphalt. That could have been invented with ease. Desperation was the inventor of ghosts, and he had been _desperate_.

“We need to talk.”

Reid rolled his eyes. Definitely not a ghost. Or, maybe, just a shitty one. Sometimes, if he was unlucky, the ghosts said things he didn’t want to hear. Things he needed to hear, sure, but that didn’t mean he liked hearing them. Acknowledging his drug addiction, for example. Demanding he talk to _someone_ about what he was feeling. Telling him he was stupid for missing all of the signs of his own isolation before it was too late to change his role.

Reid watched as Hotch approached the chair beside him, pulling it up until he could rest his elbows on the bed. Reid’s sun sent flares out. Sunburn. Blistering. Global fucking meltdown.

“You’re real this time,” Reid said, studying Hotch. He was almost certain. Almost. 

“I’m not one of your ghosts, Reid.”

“You were, before. In the car.”

“What did I say?” Hotch asked. He was so different from the ghost in the car, all buttoned up in his armor.

Reid shrugged. “You asked me what I wanted. You asked me to tell you about the stars.”

“I’m sorry. We were so wrapped up in ourselves, in the cases, we failed to notice your struggling.”

“I’m not welcome in your kingdom,” Reid said, shrugging. He looked to the doorway. “I’m used to my exile by now.” 

“You are,” Hotch said, too loud, too hard, too much. “There is no kingdom without you.”

“I don’t believe ghosts,” Reid said, turning away. No matter how much Reid wanted to hear those words, the real Hotch wouldn’t say them. He’d swallow them, thickly, down. But Reid thought the real Hotch would not have admitted to his not getting what he wanted either and he’d done that. 

Reid blinked and blinked, waiting for the big reveal. Waiting for the fist to arrive. Sometimes it took a while. That did not make it hurt any less when it finally, finally, landed. This would be the worst one yet. “It hurts too much, their promises, when they disappear.”

Hotch’s face contorted, growing angrier, before he caught himself. He shifted as if he were restrained, tied to the chair with only inches to move in any direction. “How do I prove it?”

“Prove what?”

“That I’m real.”

Spencer thought back to the Hotch in his car. The ease of his shoulders, the curve of his smile. Then, too, he pictured the Hotch on the ambulance. Ramrod straight, his glacier voice.

“Was it you on the ambulance?” Reid asked.

“Yes.”

“You found me.”

“Yes.” Hotch’s voice threatened to break on the word. Relief, Reid thought. The painful sigh of relief. Euphoric, but at what cost?

He reached out his hand, inch by inch, grasping at Reid’s against the bedspread. Hotch clutched it, hard, in his own. 

His hand was rough. 

His palm was warm.

His pulse was hammering.

“Does this prove it?”

“Yes,” Reid said, choking. The sun burned inside, painfully so. It was real. It was too real. He’d wanted Hotch to touch him. He’d been afraid to ask for it. Scaring the ghosts away with his eagerness. Scaring Hotch away with his need.

But, Hotch knew, somehow. He knew. He wouldn’t let this moment be erased by ghosts.

“You’re real,” Reid said.

“I’m real,” Hotch said. 

“He’s asking if you’re real too? What’d you do, pretty boy, hit your head while you were starving yourself to death?” Morgan appeared in the doorway, all the king's men on his heels. He beckoned them forward with his charging into the room.

Everyone arrived at once, filing through the doorway. Eyes found where Hotch clutched Reid’s hand too tightly against the bedspread, knuckles going white. Despite the impropriety, despite how private Hotch was, he refused to let go even when Reid began to pull away to save him from this very revelation.

Morgan set down a coffee cup and bags of chips were passed around, crinkling filling the room. A nurse peered her head around the doorway and frowned. Seeing Hotch’s glare, though, she scurried away with a request that the volume was kept under control. 

“There aren’t enough chairs,” Rossi said, a lightness in his voice. It was true, there weren’t enough chairs. All eyes in the room did the math.

Hotch stood, releasing Reid’s hand so quickly, it took a moment to thud against the blankets. Oh, _oh_. Hotch would touch him until it became inconvenient. Hotch would comfort him just long enough to be sure he wouldn’t go and get himself killed.

God, he _had_ to stop pressing on this bruise. The bruise in the shape of his wanting. A wound in a shape Hotch would fill, if Hotch wanted to. And oh, he wanted Hotch to want to, though he knew he never would.

A hand tapped at Reid’s shoulder. He looked up to find Hotch gesturing with his hand. _Scoot over. Make room._ Reid shifted against the railing and watched, mouth open, as Hotch squeezed in beside him. They were not holding hands, but Hotch’s entire side pressed against Reid’s.

He had shed his jacket. He had loosened his tie. He had rolled his sleeves up like his ghost had, once. Warm skin against warm skin. It was at once intimate and mundane. To passersby, it would seem familial, friendly. To Reid, because it was Hotch and not, say, Morgan or Garcia, the act was _more_. Judging by the averted eyes around the room, the team saw it too. The only one who seemed unbothered was Hotch who tapped at his phone, murmuring with Garcia and, after a few minutes, the sky was projected onto the ceiling. He pressed harder against Reid’s side, making sure he knew he was real, this was real. “Tell me about the stars, Reid.”

Rossi slipped into the abandoned chair while Morgan went hunting for another.

Reid had to press one more time. He opened his mouth and began to speak. “Saturn would float if there existed a body of water large enough to hold it.”

As he talked, at random, about matters of the sky, he looked around at the team sunken into scavenged chairs, licking Cheeto dust off of their fingers, glancing at him with tired eyes and he forgave them. None of them rolled their eyes, none of them disappeared inside their heads to somewhere more interesting than him. Not once did Hotch inch further away, no matter the comings and goings of scrub-clad strangers. He forgave them because they were real. He forgave them for not being his ghosts.

They were not perfect people, his team. They did not understand him. But they were trying. For Reid, that was enough. It had to be enough.

He had been pressing on bruises for a lifetime. He had learned to love the sting of them, to crave the pain because of the knowledge that it would, eventually, fade. But he knew now that doing so was not, in any way, helping them heal and he wanted to heal. He wanted so badly to heal.

With Hotch pressed against his side, with his team of crammed-in chairs, Reid knew he had no use for the ghosts of what should have been any longer. Spencer Reid had been seeing ghosts, but he would not ever again. He preferred the reality, for the first time in a long time. He needn’t invent anything to make him believe he was not the loneliest in this universe. Not anymore.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, here's Hotch's POV of the timeline of the first chapter. I can't promise I got his voice anywhere close to right. Let me know what you think.

Aaron Hotchner was lost at sea. He had been for some time. The sea was angry and dark and cold and touched him always, but not ever in the way he wanted. He was an anchor and the boat with all his people was far, far away.

Long, long ago, he tried to claw for the surface sometimes. On weekends or a quiet afternoon. Tried to breathe air again. God, how he missed it as bubbles slipped, still, from his lips. 

He was breath-held. 

He was rope-pulled-tight. 

Every time he tried to tell someone, tried to climb that rope into the sun, water poured from his mouth. 

Haley railed about the mess. Hotch stopped trying to speak.

Sometimes, in the dark of the night, Hotch could admit he liked being at the bottom of the ocean because no ghosts could survive there. There was no light to prove they were see-through. He could pretend they were real.

And Hotch’s boat kept getting bigger. Jack and the team and his ghosts piling one on top of the other, demanding he keep them still and safe while the sea, the sea, the horrible sea, grew more violent by the day.

And Reid came, skinny little Reid, and Hotch’s sea got a little choppier. He wasn’t sure it was worth it, at the start, all the extra tension he now held and the way his lungs began to burn and how, when he woke up, saltwater leaked from his ears all night.

Then Reid helped them solve six cases in a row and the opposite became true. While, yes, there was a little more burn, there, too, was a loosening in the slack of his rope in the form of knowing they put all those monsters behind bars. In the many hours, days, even weeks Reid saved them by diving beneath the waves of information and coming up, bleary-eyed and half-starving, with the pearl of a pattern they could use between his teeth.

The pearls held up when Hotch brought them to his teeth. Every single one. He recognized the taste of the ocean. How did Reid know what was down there in the depths? He belonged on the surface. Everyone except Hotch did.

The taste of salt flooded Hotch’s mouth every time he looked at Reid.

He found he liked the taste.

The waves, the waves were worth it, if it meant Reid was on the boat, too.

* * *

Hotch was kicking Reid, hard, and he didn’t want to be kicking Reid hard. Didn’t want to be kicking Reid at all. Not with the way Reid looked up at him, just before Hotch’s shoddy plan clicked. 

In that moment, the waves stood still and the rope pulled tight around Hotch’s neck and Reid, Reid looked like he was thinking he deserved each and every second of Hotch’s foot coming for his stomach, every letter of Hotch’s horrible words. The clutching to Hotch’s ankle, the way he curled in on himself, it was clear, crystal clear, this was not the first time he’d been treated like that and, worse by the strange relief Hotch saw flash across his face, he had been expecting it all along.

There wasn’t a lighthouse in the world that would pierce through this storm of guilt Hotch felt when he saw that look cross Reid’s face. It was only a moment, yes. Reid caught on quick. But, it was there. Unmistakably.

God, the damage Hotch did in that singular moment was mountainous. Reid would never recover. Neither would Hotch. The rope pulled tighter, ripping at his skin. Why couldn’t anyone see it choking him?

The pearls, the pearls, he wanted to say. 

But all that came out was water.

Reid brushed Hotch off with his eyes downcast and Hotch’s torso was pulsing, jerking, dying. He fought the urge to reach out and take Reid by the shoulders, shaking him. The urge to rattle Reid from the depths of whatever darkness Hotch had damned him too. 

Hotch was the only one allowed to drown here.

That night, well past when he wanted to be home, he tried to tell Haley what happened. She said, “This is getting ridiculous.” The sheets were drenched. She slept on the couch with a sigh. 

But Hotch, Hotch was used to the water. He didn’t move all night.

He thought about Reid for a long time, hoping beyond hope Hotch’s words meant nothing to him. That Reid only knew the best parts of the ocean. That he didn’t linger long in the dark.

* * *

Hotch knew Sarah Jean was an anchor the minute he saw her. The others, the boat-dwellers, the surface people, they hadn’t a clue and Hotch couldn’t say, not without sounding like he’d gone off the deep end, but he _knew_. 

Only an anchor would volunteer to plunge into that unknown just to keep their loved ones afloat. 

Only an anchor destined to stay down there.

She cut her own rope and watched everything she loved drift away, dreaming, dreaming, all the while of the moon and Hotch understood. He’d leave himself behind in the depths of the ocean if it meant saving his boat, if it meant the alternative was dragging them all down with him.

He was certain it would be him, one day, to bring his boat sinking down. It wasn’t a question of whether, but of when.

* * *

The Fisher King. Elle. After, Hotch filled the bucket with soap in the dark. 

Only the depths were supposed to look like that. 

Only _his_ depths.

He’d do what it took to keep it that way. He’d scrub every inch of the blood from the walls so Elle wouldn’t have to see it ever again. So it wouldn’t burn behind her eyelids the way it did Hotch’s. He saw that writing every time he closed his eyes. Every single time.

He was lucky to be at the bottom of the ocean, with the sediment and the salt. No one could hear him screaming.

* * *

Sometimes, Reid looked at him across the conference table or their makeshift workspace or the jet with a wince in his eyes and Hotch wondered if Reid could hear it. But that would be ridiculous. Anyone who heard what was going on in Hotch’s head would have abandoned ship a long time ago. Man overboard. Anyone with half a brain would have taken their chances with the sharks.

All his doubts, all his uncertainty, it was lucky the ship hadn’t run aground already. With all the storms they encountered, an unnatural amount, and Hotch trying to keep them afloat through them all. They forgot, the team, that some of the storms were for him and him alone. He weathered them all from below. 

So far away. 

Always, always, so damn far away.

No, Reid was just being Reid. He didn’t hear a damn thing.

* * *

Reid was just being Reid, too, when Tobias tied him up. When Tobias hurt him, killed him, brought him back to life. Hotch could see Reid’s eyes, drifting around the room, going unfocused. 

The boat hadn’t ever been so heavy. Hotch tried and tried to save Reid. Stared at those fucking cameras every second he could, stomach churning and salt rising like bile as he watched Reid suffer. He listened to Reid’s every word. He always had. And fuck if it didn’t make Hotch feel like a piece of shit when Reid had to save himself.

Reid knew Hotch more than he realized. Knew exactly how his brain would be working just then. Knew he’d be watching, listening, retching into his mouth when no one was looking all saltwater and seaweed. Reid knew Hotch so much, he could speak to him in code.

When had that happened and why did it make Hotch, for the first time in a long time, want to see the surface?

It was Hotch’s fault, all of it. In the graveyard, it was difficult to let go once he had his arms around Reid. But Hotch knew, he _knew_ , if he opened his mouth the horrible creatures from under the sea that lived inside Hotch now would come pouring out and no one, especially not Reid, deserved to see that.

He made sure Reid was with Morgan and all backs were turned before he veered off the path to vomit them up, one by painful one. They flopped there, these grotesque creatures made of his guilt, struggling for air the same way he was. There’d be more, all his failings far outnumbering anything else that lived inside of him. It wasn’t even close. There’d always be more.

No one noticed he was gone. 

No one looked up when he boarded the plane. 

As he sat down, he felt Reid’s eyes on him. He was blinking slowly, head tilted as if listening to something from far away. Hotch turned his back. He couldn’t look at Reid and not think of all the ways he had failed in exquisite detail, replaying every second of the video over and over again. Every single second.

* * *

Spencer was struggling and the boat was getting rockier and the rope, the rope, he wanted to stop feeling the rope for one goddamn second in his life so he could figure out how to help Reid, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t. He couldn’t even breathe.

Each time he tried, no words came out. The rope pulled too tight. All he could do was look from afar, wanting more than he had in a long while to be able to come to the surface. Just once, he pleaded. Just once. He’d come to the surface of whatever lay between him and Reid and help him and then he’d go back down. He promised. 

He’d stay down there forever if only the dark let him go this once.

He’d never ask for the surface again.

The ocean laughed at him in the form of Spencer missing his flight. In the way Spencer stopped touching people more than he ever had before, flinching out of Morgan’s nudges, ducking from J.J.’s hugs.

At home, the phone rang and rang and the silence on the other end wasn’t an anchor. Haley was sick of tasting sea when she kissed him. She sought out someone else to kiss.

Each time he opened his mouth, she sighed. “You fool, you’ll drown us both.”

He couldn’t tell her he wasn’t trying to drown her. He was only trying to save himself. He was only trying to breathe again. Just one single breath would be enough. Just one.

“It’s selfish to take me down with you,” she said. “Leave the BAU. Learn to breathe air again.”

They both knew lungs didn’t work like that. He had always been a sea-dweller, his whole life. With his father, with his brother, with her. She used to like the taste of salt. She used to love following his rope to the depths and surfacing again. She delighted at the fish, bubbly laughter.

But, she wanted him to laugh too and he didn’t know how to tell her he couldn’t laugh at the same time he drowned. It would only make the water fill his lungs faster.

* * *

And Garcia was shot outside her own damn apartment and Haley had divorce papers delivered in front of his whole team and, and, and. His life was a series of ands. 

The rope began fraying at either end, a storm on the horizon he wasn’t prepared for. He should have been. He should have seen it coming. He failed, again, to do his job and the people on his boat were tossed around, slamming into furniture and floor, because of it. They’d never forgive him for these bruises. No, they never would.

Sometimes, in the dark of the night, Hotch wished for a smaller boat. Wished for some reprieve. He knew his place, of course he did, he had scars on the shape of a rope around his neck inches deep to prove it. He had the grit of salt in his teeth. He hadn’t confided in anyone in years, all his secrets building sandcastles at the bottom of the sea.

* * *

When Hardwick pulled his little stunt and Reid sat across the table, eyes darting nervously to the clock, Hotch thought, well, _I bet it feels so fucking good when the rope finally snaps._ He tugged his tie off, rolling up his sleeves. Fuck this guy and this job and this life he found himself in where Reid can sit at a table like that and not feel safe, not even with Hotch around. 

His only role in Reid’s life was to keep him safe. The only one Reid afforded him.

Sometimes, in the dark of the night, Hotch wished for more.

But he couldn’t think about that now. Now, he needed to beat the shit out of this asshole who made Reid stiffen like that. Who threatened Reid while Hotch was standing right fucking there.

Yeah, it was going to feel good as hell when this rope snapped. So what if this meant the boat went on without him. So what. Let them leave him at the bottom of the ocean. Fired and divorced and alone. It wasn’t like any of them would notice anyway.

Sometimes, in the dark of the night, Hotch wondered if he wasn’t the cause of all their storms.

Maybe without him, they’d be smooth sailing. Maybe he’d been dragging them down all along.

He was about to find out when Reid opened his mouth and drew Hardwick’s eye. Hotch flinched, hating that Hardwick dared even look at Reid. Reid who was so smart and so funny and so alone. Reid who solved cases in six seconds flat and made rockets out of film canisters and invited his teammates to go out time and time again only to have them laugh at him.

If Hotch hadn’t been an anchor, he would have said yes. He had no way of explaining to Reid that the surface was so far away.

Hotch rounded Hardwick, step by step, body thrumming, pulsing with the craving to pummel him into nothing. Into less than nothing. Into negative space. Reid would know what the word for that was, but Hotch? Hotch knew the feeling. He wanted to erase him from the world with his fists for daring to threaten one of Hotch’s passengers. For daring to threaten _Reid_.

That feeling stayed long after the guards returned, breathless and dull. Long after they began the drive back home. His grip on the steering when threatened to break the plastic, his knuckles permanently white. As with the seawater, he’d have to find some way to swallow this down too.

“Thank you,” Hotch said. Reid, yet again, had done the saving between the two of them. Hotch was inches away from committing career suicide because he lost his cool on some asshole who didn’t even deserve it. But, God, all he could see were Hardwick’s eyes on Reid every time he blinked. Right there beside every other tragedy he’d caused because he was too slow to prevent it. Elle’s bloody walls and Garcia’s hospital bed and Haley’s reaction to his very existence now.

“Haley wants me to sign the divorce papers uncontested, so nobody wastes money on lawyers,” Hotch said, and water pooled in the cupholders between them, surging from his mouth. Couldn’t he set this one down? Couldn’t he get a little more space to store this new failure?

Spencer frowned, but not at the water. No, he frowned at Hotch. “You don’t want to?”

“What I want, I’m not going to get,” Hotch said, more water filling the SUV, their shoes now resting in puddles. Spencer didn’t look down, not once. Hotch kept waiting for that moment, for the sigh. For the moment Reid decided this was too much of a hassle, wet socks for the rest of the afternoon.

Passengers never had to think about the anchor. Not until they were storm-deep. To make Reid think about him when he didn’t need to was to only remind Reid of panic. It wasn’t fair.

But all Reid did was reach out and touch Hotch on the shoulder, hand warm against Hotch’s cold skin. He stared at Reid’s hand as he pulled away, expecting it to come away drenched. Expecting it to float right through him, finding him made of water after all. All this time, he concerned himself with human things. Maybe he should have gone to the ocean and let it take him after all. Maybe all his issues were because he was pretending, pretending, all this time to be like the people he loved.

An anchor couldn’t change shapes. 

He should have stopped trying long ago.

Beneath Reid’s palm, the warmth and how solid it was, Hotch let out his first real breath in years. It startled him, the rush he felt as it passed through his lips. He flinched and Reid pulled his hand away.

Reid frowned down at his hand, whispering under his breath, “Making sure you’re real.”

Hotch was only just wondering that exact thing. Was he imagining voices now, too? Was this all a hallucination, a trick of the sea to beckon him home? His siren, come calling in the form of...this? Not that it wasn’t working. He wasn’t much of a scantily clad woman singing songs kinda guy anyway. Figures this would be what got him, Reid in a car, reaching out to touch him, telling him he was real. Hotch would follow Reid to the ends of the earth if he kept doing that. 

“What?” he forced himself to say, a wave. He clutched the steering wheel harder so he didn’t grab Reid’s arm and never let it go. Somehow, when Reid told him he was real, Hotch believed it. He remembered how to breathe air again, if only for a second.

“I’m sorry about Haley,” Reid said.

Hotch frowned. He wanted Reid to tell him he was real again. He wanted to talk to Reid until the car filled with water and they both drowned in it. There was something about Reid that tasted like salt, filling the space between them. Something that made Hotch start to think Reid might actually understand what he was trying to say.

But that was just his siren, wasn’t it? All the songs warned him it’d be coming. So what if it was in a different shape than he’d expected. Nothing in his world ever looked like it ought to. His sky was miles and miles away, his sun nonexistent. This new development was no surprise.

“Me too,” Hotch said. He was really sorry that this wasn’t real. This moment between them. That it was only a trick of the light. 

The light he didn’t belong in. 

The light he desperately tried to save for Reid.

Reid sat beside him the rest of the way, his palm up on this thigh. Right there. Right there. One movement and Hotch could hold it. Almost like he wanted Hotch to. Almost.

But Reid hated touching people. It was a miracle he’d reached out at all. 

Hotch clenched the wheel harder, bones in his hands creaking against the force. Fuck. Of course his siren would be goddamn Reid. Reid who was smart and compassionate and lonely. Reid who was so very far away.

* * *

Reid stood between the bullet and his grave and Hotch was certain he’d never breathe again. That was much too much for his rope to take. The fraying was worsening by the day, each time he thought of Reid and tasted salt and found he liked the taste more and more.

And yeah, Hotch _was_ going to shoot Owen no matter how much he reminded him of Reid. The isolation, the years of shitty treatment, the light behind his eyes. Yes, Hotch would shoot him, and it would take years to recover from that singular trigger pull. He blinked and Reid switched places with Owen. Again and again, they swapped in Hotch’s mind.

He could have pulled the trigger. 

He should have pulled the trigger. 

But, fuck, he couldn’t. Not when all he could see was Reid.

He was a shitty anchor if this small storm was enough to unground him.

Reid stood between the bullet and his grave and it killed Hotch to see what might unfold, what _would_ unfold because he was too much of a coward to do what needed to be done. No one else on the team deserved to see what came next. What they all knew would come next. Reid’s body on the ground, Reid’s side stained red, Reid’s eyes gone from the light banished to the dark place Hotch called home.

His vision went foamy at the edges, the sea creeping in. If the ocean was good for one thing, it was rage. It rose within Hotch, this inherent unending unsettlement and he knew, he knew, he was more ocean than man. He always would be, now. Because of this moment, seeing Reid on the floor over and over again in his mind. In no universe could Hotch imagine a way to save him. He had missed his chance at fishing him from the water. Boat’s gone, bub. Better luck next time. Fuck.

The waves of the ocean were full of too late. Of should-have-but-didn’t. Where else would the undercurrent come from if not regret, the ache of it hurting so badly it would take everyone down with it?

Hotch didn’t even see the resolution, Owen standing down. All he could see was Reid’s body on the pavement. Every time he blinked, it was there. On the plane, he looked at Reid and saw bullet wounds dotting his body, making him see-through. Hotch retched in the toilet, an oil spill, before sitting down across from him.

He was trying to say, _thank God you’re okay._

He was trying to say, _I need you._

But what came out was, “I should fire you,” and “you’re not the only one in that room,” and “you’re keeping score, just like Owen.”

It puddled on the table between them, soaking the elbows of his jacket with the cool, dark water. Reid glanced down at his reflection, frowning.

It wasn’t as if Hotch hadn’t wanted to do the exact same thing Reid had one hundred times over. As if he hadn’t seen himself inside these monsters. There was little difference between Hotch with a gun and the man on the other end pointing back. The sky and the ocean, reflected constantly, constantly back until he could not tell the difference any longer.

“I know it’s painful when the person you identify with is the bad guy.”

“What’s that make me?” Reid asked, looking at Hotch.

Hotch had to believe, he _had_ to or it’d kill him, he was doing the right thing. That he was better because he cared about what happened when he pulled the trigger. _Just like me_ , he wanted to say. “Good at the job.”

Reid didn’t seem convinced. Hotch wasn’t either. The puddle spilled into their laps, turning Reid’s shirt and pants dark. Dark like the blood that could have been. 

Because Hotch was a coward. 

Because he couldn’t find it in himself to shoot Reid.

* * *

The bomb went off and Hotch was in the darkness for long enough to think he wasn’t ever coming back and no one arrived to help them and his ears were ringing so loud he couldn’t think straight. All he could hear was the roar of the ocean telling him, over and over again, how badly he failed. Kate on the asphalt. Hotch unable to save her through that storm.

And Morgan with the ambulance and the silence and how stupid a move that was. How selfish it was to get in that driver’s seat without so much as a thought for his own life. 

“Hotch, I did it for this team,” Morgan said.

Morgan had always wanted to be an anchor, but he couldn’t be. Not with the way he loved like he did. The only one damned to the depths was Hotch.

 _“If that bomb had gone off, do you know what that would have done to Garcia? To Reid?”_ Hotch asked, stepping closer. _“You are not an anchor, as much as you might think you are.”_

And all Morgan heard was “Would you do the same for me?” as the water spilled from Hotch’s lips. God, God, he wished someone around here understood the language of the water. He was tired of going home with soggy shoes and the knowledge no one would ever, ever understand.

And Hotch’s ears, well they’d never let him forget the ocean again, a reminder always of where he belonged. 

In a world that wasn’t this one. 

In a world that wasn’t Reid’s.

* * *

Reid on the other side of the windowpane, trapped in there with death itself. His voice wavering as he called, wondering what he should do. Asking, really, at the heart of it all, for Hotch to help him despite all Hotch’s previous failures. Asking for Hotch to save him.

It was better for Reid to stay inside, as much as it killed Hotch to say it. He was already exposed, what use would pulling him from the room be?

Hotch’s throat tightened as he said it, the slightest waver slipping through his lips in the form of water. _I don’t want you to stay._

Morgan, beside Hotch, paced and paced, wanting to have been the one exposed, the one trapped on the other side of the glass, just so Ried wouldn’t have to be. Hotch’s fingers twitched against the phone, squeezing until the plastic creaked. 

The boat was getting away from him. He had lost any thought he’d ever had that he had it under control.

Hotch did not visit Reid in the hospital. He retched ocean water the black of guilt, bathtubs full at a time.

* * *

Hotch woke to the team hovering around his bed and pain, that sharp pain cutting through the fog of whatever medication they had given him. He counted all his passengers one by one.

“Where’s Reid?” he asked, panic clawing at his throat, clearing the fog in an instant. How long had he been out and had Foyet gotten to him too? Had he known by some miracle that Reid was the one Hotch was the softest for? The one that would kill Hotch the most to be unable to save yet again?

Every breath tugged at stitches, pulling on his rope. The fraying was halfway through and getting worse every second no one said anything about where Reid was. With the glance Prentiss and Morgan shared, it was as if they’d only just remembered Reid existed.

“It was a happy ending,” Rossi said about the case they’d worked while Hotch was missing. If it was such a goddamn happy ending, where was Reid? 

As far as Hotch was concerned, no ending was happy if he wasn’t there. 

The others had a different picture of what happy meant.

Hotch later learned happy meant Reid, left on the lawn with a bullet wound in his knee cap. Happy meant Reid on crutches for months, in physical therapy for longer, still. Meant surgery now, maybe surgery later. Meant a lifetime of compensating for the damage that was done. Meant Rossi leaving him in a ditch without any way except pain, out of there.

No wonder Hotch tasted salt when Reid was around. The rest of the team left him at sea so often he started to learn to breathe it.

One night, after the bullpen emptied of everyone except the two of them, Hotch hovered at Reid’s desk.

 _I’m sorry,_ he tried to say. “How’s the knee?” he asked.

Reid shrugged. “It’s fine. Not your fault.”

But it was. It _was._ If Hotch hadn’t been stupid, if Hotch had been paying attention, he would have known Foyet was inside his place. That Foyet was there. He could profile a man down to his socks for fuck’s sake. His only excuse was the rope stretched too thin. And now Reid was hurt and alone because of it.

 _I would have visited you. I didn’t know._ “I know.”

“Hotch, come on. You had more important things to worry about.”

But the anchor was never as important as the boat. Never. _You’re important._ “Reid.”

The bullpen was half-full of water, desks lifting from their places. Reid stood, looking down. Hotch sighed, apologizing. He turned to go, wading through the knee-deep water.

“Hotch, wait,” Reid said, catching Hotch’s wrist in his fingers. Warm, solid. Two things that couldn’t survive in the world Hotch lived in.

He tugged, gently, away from Reid and Reid, after a moment, let go. “Don’t.” _I’ll only drown us both._

Reid opened his mouth to reply, but Hotch left before he could. It was hard to balance, this being separate from the team but being a part of it at the same time. He could only get so close, but he couldn’t ever breach the surface. If the ringing in his ears was proof of anything it was that he belonged down below. He could hear the waves, that deep silence, even now.

* * *

And Haley died. And J.J. left. And Reid’s headaches began, rope tightening further when he continued to hide them. And Emily had to fake her death and Hotch had to watch that storm ravage his team without being able to do anything about it.

* * *

A new case arrived in June, each and every victim completely and totally alone. Reid flinched as he read the case on the jet, his whole body jerking. Hotch was the only one who saw and he averted his eyes just as Reid glanced around so he wouldn’t know Hotch saw. Another Owen. There would always, always be another Owen.

All of the people in all of the cars could have left. They could have left. The same way Hotch could have left the BAU. The same way any of them could, but didn’t. Hotch knew all about how it felt to be trapped with the keys in his hand and still, still, he couldn’t bring himself to open the goddamn door.

Three days into the investigation, Reid didn’t show up at their makeshift office made in the breakroom at the local police department. Morgan shrugged. “Maybe he finally got some sleep.”

He and Hotch hadn’t left the night before until well into the morning. Maybe he passed out the way he did on random couches and floors and sometimes sitting up when exhaustion finally snuck up on him from behind. Hotch left an extra blanket in his SUV because of his tendency to do just that.

It was strange, though, that he’d sleep in his hotel room. Reid hardly ever spent any time in there. Hotch couldn’t pick out a single time Reid had stayed more than a few hours in his. He was at the office to the very end. The only one there longer was Hotch, who often sat there, staring at the walls, while Reid slept beside him.

Sometimes, in the dark of the night, Hotch found he liked the sound of Reid’s breathing. It drowned out the waves, somehow.

When noon came and there still was no sign of Reid, Hotch’s mouth filled with water. Where the fuck was he and why was he the only one to care?

“Leave him alone,” Prentiss said. She eyed Hotch and he understood. Maybe he had a headache. 

But, usually Hotch could tell. The way Reid’s eyes winced, his hands shook ever so slightly beneath the table, the way his body caved in where he sat, trying to curl around the pain. He didn’t see any of those signs the night before. Hours before, really, when they’d parted ways.

“Pretty boy needs his beauty rest,” Morgan chimed in, frowning at the case file in his hands. 

But Hotch couldn’t shake how wrong this felt, all of it. The way, the night before, Reid wouldn’t meet his eyes.

At 2:02, Hotch shoved from the table, causing all heads to jerk in his direction. He didn’t stop or explain himself. He was pretty sure if he opened his mouth, so much water would come out none of them would survive it. Worry bubbled in his gut, dread building. There was only one piece of the rope holding him together and this? This threatened to snap it as if it were straw.

Reid wasn’t in his hotel room. Reid’s SUV wasn’t in the parking lot. His phone was turned off when Hotch asked Garcia to check, his voice too high for his own good.

“Find him,” he demanded. Black water in the toilet and the bathtub and the side of the road.

When he got back to the police station, every face in the room was more concerned than before. It was about time. Had it been JJ or Morgan to disappear, would it have taken Reid this long to notice? Of course not. Of course not.

“Just sleeping, huh?” Hotch growled.

“We didn’t know,” Morgan said.

“He’s part of this team whether you like him or not.”

“We like Reid,” Prentiss protested.

“Act like it,” Hotch said, going back through the case from the beginning, finding it harder and harder to breathe. His torso pulsed, flinching, for air, sweet air, but he couldn’t find it anywhere. Not even when he pushed out of the precinct onto the sidewalk, the sun shining down from a cloudless sky. Reid was the only one who made him feel like he could breathe again.

It was a steady roar in his ears, the only thing that had ever drowned out the sound of the waves except Reid’s soft breathing, the fact that _Reid is gone, Reid is gone, Reid is gone._

Hotch was certain, now, his rope had snapped. His boat was lost to the waves and he couldn’t give less of a shit if that meant Reid wasn’t on it. If that meant Reid was trapped or hurt or, well, Hotch couldn’t think beyond that or before he was bent over, gasping for air with his hands on his knees.

The door at his back opened and he knelt pretending to tie his shoelaces, as feet appeared in his line of vision.

“We’ll find him,” Rossi said, placing a hand on Hotch’s shoulder.

Hotch flinched, remembering when Reid touched him that day in the car after Hardwick. The expression on his face, the palm left on his thigh facing up. _Making sure you’re real,_ he had said. 

Hotch hadn’t been sure since that moment, nor any moment before. Only under Reid’s palm, under his assurance, had Hotch ever believed he existed. Because Dr. Reid spoke in facts. In truths. If Reid said Hotch was real, he was real and that thought, so intoxicating and so horrible, slammed into him as he crouched on the sidewalk. 

If he was real to Reid and Reid was gone, that meant he’d have no way of knowing ever again.

He flinched out from under Rossi’s palm, standing straight to hide his lungs pulsing with need.

“I know,” he said, keeping his voice even. So even. Not even an inch of panic seeped out. He made sure of it.

“Aaron,” Rossi said, looking at Hotch in a way Hotch didn’t want to be looked at in. The crinkling at the corner of his eyes, the downturn of his mouth. No, Hotch didn’t want to be looked at like that. It told him he was doing a shit job of hiding his feelings. It told him Rossi knew too much about what Reid meant to Hotch, how precariously everything was balanced around him.

Reid was the one Hotch saw when he glanced out his office window at two, three, four o’clock in the morning, without fail. The only one. After the whole Tobias fiasco, Hotch glanced at Reid every five minutes it seemed, just to be sure he was still there. It was a habit, a bad one it seemed by the way Rossi was now looking at him, but he couldn’t help it. 

If Reid was there, it meant things were at least a little bit okay. 

It meant there was hope for this boat.

But now the hope was gone and Hotch was having a fucking hard time keeping that inside. The amount of goddamn water raging in his chest, surging up his throat, roaring in his ears, was much too much. He was going to drown the world if things went the way he couldn’t stop thinking about them going, no matter how much it killed him to. Splitting open old scars, pressing on bruises, thinking the worst imaginable thing over and over again. A reminder of what could happen if he dropped the ball and, fuck, he dropped the ball this time, letting Reid out of his sight for even a second.

“I know,” Hotch said, refusing to look at Rossi. Refusing to cave. Straight shoulders, always upright. Such was the way of the anchors, never changing their shape.

“He’s smart,” Rossi said, shoving his hands into his jean pockets.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Hotch said. Reid was the smartest person in every room they ever walked into which meant one of two things happened. Either whoever grabbed him was smarter, a horrifying thought, or...or...Reid didn’t get outsmarted. He went willingly.

It wasn’t exactly as if Hotch hadn’t ever thought about walking into the ocean and never resurfacing. And, could Hotch blame Reid for wanting to? The team treated him like shit and the whole Tobias thing and the drugs and the headaches and, and, and. Reid’s life was a series of ands the same way Hotch’s was. Bruises never allowed to heal before new ones were punched on top.

Sometimes, in the dark of the night, Hotch felt the same way.

“Guys,” Prentiss said from the doorway. “Two people have been reported missing.”

Rossi turned, instructing Prentiss and Morgan to interview the first family, JJ and Rossi would take the second. He waited until Prentiss disappeared before looking back at Hotch who still stared out at the passing cars, breath held.

“We’ll find him.”

“Go,” Hotch said.

Rossi paused a moment, eyes on Hotch, before disappearing back inside. He waited ten seconds, twenty, before letting out a gasp, trying and trying and failing to take in any air.

He went inside, pushing into the bathroom, splashing water on his face. When he looked up, his lips were blue in the mirror. He was so close to staying at the bottom of the ocean. To letting the boat crash and break into pieces and scatter everything he spent so long protecting become shark food because, fuck, it was exhausting day after day, keeping track of it all.

The hours passed, Hotch reading for the hundredth time every document in the case file they’d been given for any sign of where Reid might have gone. The team came back, shoulders slumped. All the missing people had been estranged from their families, more or less. Isolated and living alone and at odds with the ones who loved them. It was a miracle they’d been reported missing at all, chance family dinners scheduled at random or the rare plans made and bailed on. They wouldn’t have even counted at missing persons, had the last two sets of people not been found. Had Hotch not demanded they be informed of every single report that came through the minute Reid went missing.

On the second day, Morgan sighed. “Wish Reid were here. He’d have this thing solved already.”

Hotch couldn’t help himself, snapping, “Remember that next time you leave him alone with a bullet wound in his knee.”

“He told us to go. To find you,” JJ said softly. “He said he was fine.”

“We’ve all said that. Why do you only listen when it’s Reid saying it?” 

Hotch’s hospital room was brimming. Everyone was there the minute he woke up. They only seemed to listen to protests at being cared for when they came from Reid’s lips.

“Hotch, you were --”

“So was he.” He stood from the room and stalked outside, anger joining his panic in one horrid cocktail that made him lightheaded.

They didn’t know how Reid was. They couldn’t have known. He could have bled out before the ambulance even arrived. He could have lost his leg. It wasn’t a terribly far stretch to imagine that whole scenario going much, much worse.

They’d all said they were fine. 

Even when they weren’t.

It was well past dark and Hotch looked up. Stars stabbed through the depths everywhere he looked, little pinpoint eyes staring down, down, down. He wanted Reid to tell him about the stars. He wanted to hear Reid talk and talk whole universes into existence. 

God, he just wanted Reid to be alive and okay enough to ramble until Hotch’s brain went blank and he didn’t have to think about anything at all for a while. He could just let Reid tell him something incredible. The rope would give, just a little, and Hotch would get a moment of peace.

No one came to fetch Hotch and when he returned after too long, all heads were bent down, frowns pasted on every face he looked at. Even Garcia’s voice on speakerphone was muted and dull as she came up empty yet again on any connection the victims had.

It wasn’t until the sun came up that anyone slipped away to sleep.

On the third day, two more people were reported missing. A woman, Kristie Louis, mid-thirties, single mother with twin boys and not nearly enough money to stretch around what she was spending on their preschool and a man in his sixties, dying of cancer. His family thought he’d gone off to die, but figured he’d have left at least a note behind.

“We’ll need to retrace their steps the day they went missing,” Hotch said.

“Shouldn’t we try retracing Reid’s, too?” JJ asked. “Look at him as a victim rather than one of us?”

Fuck, the restraint it took not to flinch was astronomical when JJ said the word victim and Reid in the same sentence. He pictured all those bodies in all those cars, gaunt and rotting and _alone._ So goddamn alone. 

That would be a tragedy from which Hotch would never recover. 

His sea would never still again.

“Who spent the most time with him on Friday?” Prentiss asked.

Every head in the room turned in Hotch’s direction. He nodded. “Prentiss and Rossi, take Kristie. Morgan and JJ, the other.”

* * *

Hotch hesitated at the precipice of Reid's hotel room. He felt like he was crossing some boundary they’d never spoken aloud. Not that Reid was in his hotel room much, but still, it was _his_. All his things were in there.

Then Hotch pictured those people, dead in their cars, and the panic overrode his hesitation. He tore the goddamn room apart, searching for any sign of where Reid had gone.

Nothing. He had nothing.

He sank down onto Reid’s bed and thought. Where would Reid have gone if he couldn’t sleep? Hotch could tell he hadn’t, the sheets were too perfectly rumpled for that. Reid wanted him to know he hadn’t slept. He was too smart to think Hotch would be tricked by _that._

So where else would he have gone?

Reid often walked to nearby coffee shops and, sometimes when he thought no one was paying attention, to payphones in the area.

Hotch would do that. He’d walk all day if he had to.

The first coffee shop turned up nothing, and Hotch was about to give up at the second when the flyer on the bulletin board caught his eye. Prize money, bring only your car, come alone. Tick, tick, tick. This was it. It _had_ to be.

He had Garcia running the phone number for a location before he even made it back to the office. She read him a few addresses: an apartment complex, a shopping center, a park in the middle of nowhere. Bingo.

Garcia let the rest of the team know, but they were across the city and wouldn’t make it as fast as Hotch would. He had Garcia call ambulances to the scene. He had a feeling he would need them as much as that made the panic roar up his throat. He coughed and coughed again, water filling his mouth he was so full of guilt and grief, trying to clear some room so he could focus.

He pulled into the parking lot and found seven cars parked, spaces between them, and in the last spot on the right side, there was Reid’s car. The fear of what he would find froze him. Ice age come in one singular second. He couldn’t do it. He _couldn’t._

But, if he didn’t, someone else would. Morgan or, worse, JJ. He had to, though he couldn’t. Thus was the way of the anchor with a boat too large to handle. He had to keep shit together even when it was impossible. It was his job. It was his role. He had no other use in this world than this.

Hotch yelled Reid’s name as he approached the vehicle, searching for any sign of movement through the glass. But Reid’s eyes stayed closed, a small smile pasted on his lips.

“I’m smashing the window,” Hotch warned. If Reid could hear, he wanted him to be ready for the onslaught. Hotch shattered the window after one, two, three strikes with the butt of his gun, sending shards raining down, red pinpricks blooming on Reid’s arms and face.

Still, he didn’t move. Hotch reached in, slicing a large line down his forearm as he did. Grasping Reid’s cheeks, he shook him, needing to see him move, needing it so badly he wasn’t sure he’d survive this. When he still got no response, Hotch yanked him from the car. Too hard, too hard, but panic had his muscles singing. 

He could lift a vehicle. 

He could smash the world. 

And he would, he would, if this world was a one in which Reid left them all behind.

He searched Reid for any vital wounds, finding only the ones left behind by the glass. None would even require stitches, by his assessment. He let out a sigh of relief.

“I need a medic,” Hotch called, voice splitting. “Where are those ambulances?”

Garcia, on the other line, called out their ETA. Sixty seconds.

Hotch held a hand over Reid’s lips, relieved to find him still breathing. A twitch of Reid’s fingers against the asphalt.

“You’re okay,” Hotch said, grasping at Reid’s hand so tightly he felt the bones grind together. He was so goddamn mad, he wanted to break every finger on Reid’s hand for coming here, for doing this willingly, for wanting to leave him behind. And, more than that, for not saying goodbye.

“Thank God,” Hotch growled. “How could you be so stupid?”

The flashing lights arrived and two men with stretchers came over. More ambulances filled the parking lot, shattering windows and pulling bodies from inside. Two of the victims were semi-conscious. Everyone else was unresponsive. They’d gotten there just in time.

As they loaded up Reid, Hotch said, “I’m riding with him.”

The guys hardly spared him a second glance, slamming the doors and peeling out of the lot the second Hotch sat down.

Now Reid was in front of him, his anger grew and grew, worse, even, than the panic ever was. How could Reid do this to the team? How could he do this to Hotch? Weren’t they friends? The team, he could understand with all their quips and eye-rolling and silence, but Hotch talked to Reid and asked him questions and spent time working beside him so much he could tell by the scratch of his pen if he was stumped or if he had made a breakthrough. He _knew_ Reid. 

This, then, and the fact he could not have predicted it was a slap in the face. 

Did the team, this job, this life, mean nothing to Reid? Did Hotch?

“You gave up,” Hotch muttered, over and over again. “You gave up.”

Reid’s eyes opened as whatever the man gave him through the IV kicked in. His voice was weak as he said, “I am not welcome in the kingdom.”

Hotch opened his mouth to argue, when Reid continued. “I think I invented you.”

And Hotch couldn’t stop thinking about Reid, those three days in that car, all alone. So alone. Alone enough to be there at all. He rubbed at his temples so he wouldn’t start yelling. Hotch was certain, more than ever, this was the universe in which he was the most disappointed by the world.

“I wasn’t alone. The ghosts kept me company. Your ghost.”

“The ghosts?” Hotch asked, staring at Reid.

“The ghosts of you.”

Hotch sighed. Reid was out of it. He shouldn’t let the idea of Reid, inventing Hotch in his darkest hour to keep him company, surge through his chest like that. It meant nothing. He must have invented hundreds of people.

At least Reid was talking, even if he wasn’t making any sense. Hotch wanted to keep him talking, proof that he was going to be okay. “What do the ghosts say?”

Reid smiled. “They are kind to me when no one else is.”

Hotch flinched, trying to hide it from Reid. He definitely didn’t need Hotch's feelings making things worse just then. No, he had far more important things to worry about like staying fucking alive.

“When I was shot they filled all of the empty chairs.”

“I’m sorry,” Hotch said as he watched Reid’s eyes close. They fluttered as he tried to fight it. 

“Your lips are blue,” Reid whispered. 

Then he lost the fight and lost badly. It was a good thing to lose a battle that meant nothing but peace. Perhaps that’s what made Reid call that number, drive to that parking lot, refuse to use his keys to unlock his goddamn door even though they were in the cupholder, right there, the whole time he began to starve.

Sometimes, in the dark of the night, Hotch wished he wasn’t too much of a coward to lose his battle, too.

* * *

Hotch watched from outside as the team surrounded Reid when he woke back up. They’d made it to the scene only minutes after the ambulance had left. Morgan and Rossi stayed to get the rest of the victims into ambulances and called the crime scene unit in before racing back here. It wasn’t long before Reid was blinking awake, all of them angry and hurt and so relieved he could feel it seeping off of them like ripples from a large stone.

One by one, the team filtered out of the room, glancing in Hotch’s direction and trying to hide it as they did. He couldn’t help the anger that had built, an underwater volcano erupted, the more he thought about what Reid had done. How scared it made Hotch those long three days.

When the room was finally empty, Hotch stalked into the room. He made no attempts at hiding his rage. The ocean did not. Why should he? “We need to talk.”

Reid, in the bed, had the audacity to roll his eyes. Hotch scraped a chair so close to the bed his knees pressed into the plastic, knobs digging into his skin. He rested his elbows on the bed.

“You’re real this time.” Reid’s eyes were narrowed, as if he wasn’t quite sure.

“I’m not one of your ghosts, Reid,” Hotch sighed. He wanted to talk to Reid, but he didn’t know how. Especially not with Reid talking about these hauntings.

He wanted to say they all were haunted. It wasn’t a new development. But, there was something about Reid’s insistence, his simple statement of fact, that allowed Hotch to keep his anger in check. Reid wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true. He was being visited by ghosts of people who were still alive.

“You were, before. In the car.” Reid’s voice broke. Hotch softened. If Reid wanted to talk in metaphors, Hotch needed to catch up enough to join in.

“What did I say?” he asked. He hadn’t noticed the water filling the room until now. He was ankle deep and it was only getting worse the longer he talked to Reid.

“You asked me what I wanted. You asked me to tell you about the stars.” The stars. The stars. Like that night he looked up and wanted exactly that, wanted Reid to tell him about them all.

He sighed. If Reid needed to invent ghosts just to get someone to ask him a question, they’d failed him so badly they didn’t deserve the title of a team. “I’m sorry. We were so wrapped up in ourselves, in the cases, we failed to notice your struggling.”

“I’m not welcome in your kingdom,” Reid shrugged, as if it was fine, as if he didn’t mind. “I’m used to my exile by now.” 

If this team was a kingdom, it was Hotch who was not welcome. Hotch who spoke another language and couldn’t ask to come through the doors. Not Reid. Never Reid. “You are,” Hotch said, too loud, too hard, too much. “There is no kingdom without you.”

“I don’t believe ghosts,” Reid said and on the bed, he turned his back on Hotch. His spine shone through his hospital gown, too exposed. The sight made Hotch sad, thinking of extinct dinosaurs, thinking of desperation, thinking of extinction.

In a small and far away voice, Reid said, “It hurts too much, their promises, when they disappear.”

Anger surged, yet again, at the thought that even Reid’s inventions weren’t kind enough to stay. He caught himself, shifting as the need to do _something_ rattled through him. “How do I prove it?”

“Prove what?”

“That I’m real.”

After so long Hotch wondered if Reid lost the battle against his exhaustion again, he asked, “Was it you in the ambulance?”

“Yes.”

“You found me.”

“Yes.” Hotch’s voice threatened to break on the word. God, now Reid was there in front of him, relief seeped out. A crack in the bottom of the ocean, letting long-forgotten feelings free. The water had overtaken them both.

He thought of the twitch of Reid’s fingers on the asphalt. The way Reid touched Hotch’s shoulder after Hardwick to make sure he was real. On impulse, Hotch reached out and grabbed Reid’s hand, the IV wires sticking out.

Reid’s hand froze and stayed frozen for long enough Hotch began to doubt himself. Had he crossed yet another unspoken boundary between them? Was it only okay for Reid to touch him and not the other way around? Just as he was about to pull away, an apology spilling from his lips, Reid’s hand tightened around his own.

“Does this prove it?” Hotch asked.

“Yes.”

Water to the ceiling, they both remained where they were, clutching each other, breathing water. Reid, too, held oceans inside. He’d long ago grown gills.

“You’re real,” Reid said, grinning.

“I’m real,” Hotch said, returning the grin. 

“He’s asking if you’re real too? What’d you do, pretty boy, hit your head while you were starving yourself to death?” Morgan appeared in the doorway, shattering the moment. The hospital room was just a hospital room again, not a drop of water left behind. But Hotch? Hotch could breathe now all that water was gone.

Hotch clutched Reid’s hand so hard, his knuckles went white as the team filtered in. Reid made to pull away as every set of eyes lingered on the bedspread, but Hotch refused to let him. This was real. He needed to know this was real.

“There aren’t enough chairs,” Rossi said as bodies sank into the chairs scattered around the room. Before, Hotch had been outside. Always, always, outside. Now, there were not enough chairs and Rossi was looking at him in that way again and moving anywhere meant letting go of Reid’s hand.

Hotch made his decision in less than a second, letting Reid’s hand go so quickly, it landed on the bed with an audible thump. He glanced up with a look on his face, the same look he had while Hotch kicked him all those years ago, the same look that flashed across his face when Hardwick began to round the table. He had been expecting this. 

His deduction game was off. 

He profiled Hotch all wrong.

Hotch tapped Reid on the shoulder, gesturing for him to move over. Reid, open-mouthed, followed orders and Hotch squeezed into the opened space. It was a tight squeeze, if he was being honest, and probably not the most appropriate plan of action in retrospect, but the length of his entire body pressed against Reid’s. 

There would be no doubting what was real anymore.

Hotch pretended not to see the way eyes dodged past them around the room, as if they were witnessing some obscene act. Maybe, considering his track record with affection of any kind, this would be a shock to them. But he wasn’t leaving. They’d adapt.

Garcia whispered him through how to get the sky projected on the ceiling and hit the light switch across the room for him so he wouldn’t have to leave. “Tell me about the stars, Reid.”

Hotch could feel Reid hesitate, guessing even now if this was some schoolyard trick. He pressed, harder, against Reid’s side, convincing him that this was real and he wanted to know and the team would sit there if he wanted to talk for six years because they were a team and that’s what teams did. Hotch made that very clear while they waited for Reid to wake up. Very, _very_ clear. 

“Saturn would float, if there existed a body of water large enough to hold it,” Reid said hesitantly, glancing around the room. No rolled eyes, no side conversations, only the crunching of snacks and eyes on Reid as he continued to tell them about the stars.

Hotch refused to budge as nurses came to check on his IV and his vitals and whatever else they scribbled onto their clipboards. Refused to budge as Reid shifted to get more comfortable after half an hour and then again an hour later. Refused to budge that night when Reid fell asleep beside him.

The sound of his breathing such sweet relief, Hotch wanted to weep.

Aaron Hotchner was lost at sea, but against all odds his boat made it through the storm and Reid breathed water, sometimes, and the whole team was there in front of him and the surface was not as far away as he thought it was. Not anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> I've only watched through season 6. If the urge to continue this comes after finishing the rest, I'll do so, but as of right now, this is it! Thanks for reading! Drop me a comment or stop by my Tumblr at [ kibberswrites ](https://kibberswrites.tumblr.com/).


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